Clothes Make the Man
My father and I argue periodically about appearance. Our arguments revolved around a central point: do my attitudes come from the clothes I wear or do my clothes reflect my pre-existing attitudes? It started when I was about five and was forced to wear dress shoes to church rather than sneakers. Sneakers were much better for play1 so it was unfathomable to me that I should have to wear anything else, especially for the benefit for other people. They continued with my "box"2 hair cut in high school and my rave jeans in college.
At a point I was able to see my father’s wisdom. I found that looking “presentable” made me more accessible and people took me a little bit more seriously. I found that if I made sure I bought stuff from safe places, I’d look boring, corporate safe, unexpressive, and no one would bother me about clothes.
Paul Graham’s most recent essay, What the Bubble Got Right, places appearance as one of the noble corrections that the Internet boom brought:
Clothes are important, as all nerds can sense, though they may not realize it consciously.
If you're a nerd, you can understand how important clothes are by asking yourself how you'd feel about a company that made you wear a suit and tie to work. The idea sounds horrible, doesn't it? In fact, horrible far out of proportion to the mere discomfort of wearing such clothes. A company that made programmers wear suits would have something deeply wrong with it.
And what would be wrong would be that how one presented oneself counted more than the quality of one's ideas. That's the problem with formality. Dressing up is not so much bad in itself. The problem is the receptor it binds to: dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as "suits."
Nerds don't just happen to dress informally. They do it too consistently. Consciously or not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity.
Graham expresses my approach, my attitudes, and my frustrations with the whole notion of dress. Perhaps that qualifies me as a “nerd” but I don’t think the idea is relegated to the technically proficient. Umberto Eco has an essay in his book Travels in Hyperreality about jeans and describes his rejection of tight, aesthetic conscious garb as a mentality similar to medieval monks; their free flowing, spacious attire removed all attention from external appearance which left them free to think.
But, as noble as it is to free oneself of the physical aesthetic and seek total immersion in ideas, I think that there is a higher ideal. To impose structure beyond oneself, I believe, is bigger, better, and more virtuous than to simply exist unperturbed in one’s own thoughts. Some people (I think of them loosely as architects), are always in the process of bringing order from what is naturally uncategorized and spontaneous. It is not limited to just buildings. It extends into landscape, ideas, and even the smallest of things, dress.
1To this day my thoughts on clothes are dominated by function, not form.
2Just like J.R. Reid.
11:30:59 PM 
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